


In This Diary

by msmaj



Series: 2019 Songfic Writing Challenge [3]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Pining, Summer before Senior year, writing seminar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-12-07 22:14:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20983241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msmaj/pseuds/msmaj
Summary: Betty and Jughead meet at a writing seminar.





	In This Diary

_ _

_Here in this diary,_  
_I write you visions of my summer_  
_It was the best I ever had_  
_There were choruses and sing-alongs_  
_And that unspoken feeling_  
_of knowing that right now is all that matters._

**In This Diary-The Ataris**

The summer before senior year is historically hectic. Between SAT and ACT prep, extracurriculars, community service, it’s a wonder that Betty Cooper even got a moment's rest. Of course, because she had every minute of her summer (including free time) mapped out, she would get notified that a position had become available at the prestigious writer’s retreat she was initially rejected from.

Getting to it and out of all her other obligations was no small feat, but, with deft humility and what she likened to mental gymnastics, she got there. Eight weeks away from New York, from her narcissistic mother and apathetic father, and the friends who always seemed like they had more important things to do. Eight weeks with likeminded people, good books and herself.

The campus was warm and inviting, not the monolithic buildings with their windowed walls she was used to in the city. Riverdale’s small university felt like some cliched, idyllic embodiment of what the countryside used to be. And she loved every second of it. From the perfectly manicured lawns to the stone facades of the lecture halls, she felt more and more at home with every day that passed.

Her single dorm had been clean, though surprisingly cold and sterile compared to how homey everything else had felt. She’d decorated modestly, a few framed pictures of her sister and friends from back home, and finally, sheets in a color other than pink. After the long days of instruction and group work, she was happy to come back to her small sanctuary and sink into the seafoam coziness.

It’s wrapped up in the soft fleece she feels comfortable enough to pull out her journal. She hadn’t been able to keep one recently. Her mother was overbearing on a good day and the last year, well, she took it to a whole new level. Not that she’d ever had much privacy, but she had thought her diary at least was off-limits. Everyone had boundaries, except Alice Cooper it turned out. Now, here, far out of her mother’s expertly manicured clutches, she can put the pen to the page and try to sort out her mind.

She had expected rigorous lessons, these classes were supposed to emulate the college ones she’d be taking in just a year, but everyone in them seemed to be on a different level than her. Betty was a journalist at heart, she wrote well and with conviction, but her writing did follow patterns. Truth. She laid it out as best she could, doing the facts justice while trying to reach her audience, but this seminar was in creative writing. And creative wasn’t something that Betty found came naturally to her.

It was the second week of the eight when she was approached. Sitting in the library, her second favorite place, her overthinking was interrupted by a messenger bag loudly hitting the table in front of her.

Confused, and a little annoyed, she looked up only to be greeted with the most beautiful blue eyes. “Um,” she cleared her throat. “Can I help you?”

He smiled, pulling out the chair, turning it around and sitting. “I think that maybe we can help each other.”

She’d be a liar if she said she hadn’t noticed him. With dark wavy hair and eyes that seemed to look right through her, he was exactly the kind of trouble she wasn’t planning on getting into. It helped in dissuading her that he carried himself the way most disaffected youths do; cool and aloof, sat at the back of the class, injecting only to be argumentative. (Even if his arguments were always thoroughly thought out and actually raised questions that Betty would have never thought to ask.)

Which is why when he dropped his stuff on her table that day, instead of rebuking him, she raised a dainty eyebrow and asked him what he had in mind.

He needed a critical eye; someone meticulous, methodical, detail-oriented, “With all your color-coded notes and penchant for detail, I figured who better.”

“And in return?” He leaned in, chair on two legs as its back rested against the table's edge. She wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light, the way his eyes seemed to darken as he watched her, or maybe it was just what she wanted to see.

“Seems like you need help getting out of your head,”_If he only knew._ “Your writing that is, it’s great—don’t get me wrong—but it’s all very…”

“Clinical?” Betty offered.

A smirk played on his lips. “That’s a good word for it. You write like you’re trying to convince everyone that there’s a story being untold, instead of letting it unfold organically. It’s your story, you set the tone, you set the tempo, there’s no one-size-fits-all option in creative writing. You have to start letting yourself show through.”

That’s how it started. A new notebook—blue—filled with hastily jotted observations in her perfect print and his semi-legible scrawl. He would always point out when she got too deep in her own thoughts and when her writing started to reflect it, and she helped him rein in his penchant for superfluous detail. They worked in beautiful tandem. One month into the program, two weeks after they’d met in the library, she not only noticed a change in her writing but in herself.

She found her reflection smiling back at her more often than not. Jughead, his acerbic commentary, and general vitriol were usually traits that repelled Betty, but here, where she didn’t have crushing expectations she was free to feel. Melancholia had been no stranger to Betty, her life a predetermined series of points set out by her parents, a living, breathing, paint by numbers. Pretty, pastel, prosaic.

But not in Riverdale.

In Riverdale, she was simply Betty. In her most base, true form. She found people who encouraged her writing and growth, and in return, found she really enjoyed the editorial component of writing. Almost more so than the act itself. There was a kind of peace in restructuring other people's works. Hearing for their voice, helping them to define and refine it. The freedom afforded to her over the summer had started to wear at her Type A proclivities, editing gave her some of that control back. But she had learned to enjoy that freedom in equal measure.

And she never would have gotten there without Jughead. The townie, she learned later, having lived in Riverdale his whole life and planning on attending this writing retreat since he could remember. Jughead who learned how she took her coffee in a matter of days. Jughead whose words struck chords within her as though he were a maestro, creating symphonies in prose.

Or maybe that’s just how she felt when she’d catch him looking at her. Staccato heartbeat, blood pounding in her ears, fire burning just under the surface of her skin. The rampant thoughts that ran through her head when they were together only letting themselves out when she sat down with her diary at the end of the day. What was once a detailed catalog of her day to day, from activities to feelings was now an abstract.

In her diary, she found her voice. She discovered poetry. More aptly she discovered how to use poetry. She found that, while she probably wouldn’t ever be a great writer of non-fiction, she could convey more with less in poetry. That her deliberate words carried more weight than the flowery supposition she thought she wanted.

It was in there, privately pressed between the pages, she confessed. Her fears, her doubts, how her heart sped up while the time simultaneously slowed when his arm would brush against hers as they lounged on her bed. That she noticed he hadn’t tried to make any other friends here, keeping everyone else at arm's length while letting her—inviting her—encroach into his carefully curated bubble. That even though all signs pointed to yes, even this more confident, more comfortable Betty was terrified of rejection.

She’d never been a stranger to it; she was initially rejected from this intensive after all. Before, she was expected to plaster on a Cooper approved smile and bury whatever feelings that presented themselves.

Now, she didn’t think she’d be able to do that. Jughead had helped her find so much more than just words. When she’d admitted she hadn’t had a cheeseburger in two years because her mother didn’t approve, he insisted on taking her to Pop’s.

“It’s not _just_ a diner, Betty,” he said, slinging one leg over his motorcycle. He held his helmet up, urging that she take it. “It’s a Riverdale institution. You can’t be in this town for any amount of time without partaking in a milkshake and double cheeseburger.”

She slid the helmet over her head, hair loose around her shoulders for the first time in her life. She watched as his tongue peeked between his lips as he took her in. “This is my first time on a bike though, so, go slow,” her voice was muffled by the helmet she knew, but he heard her. Straddling the bike, she loosely wrapped her arms around his waist, trying not to think about how soft the leather of his jacket would feel against the skin or how the hard planes of his stomach would feel under her hands.

“I’m afraid going slow would be much worse. You’re just going to have to hold on much tighter than that.” She felt the air expel from his lungs as she tightened her grip. Maybe he was as affected by her presence as she was his. If he was though, he didn’t show it for the rest of the night. Aside from helping her off the bike, he didn’t initiate contact and made himself impossibly small looking in the booth, somehow physically shrinking into himself when he still seemed so emotionally open with her.

Even from the most mundane of topics the conversation flowed. He could make anything interesting, she loved watching his eyes light up when he got lost in the excitement of a good conspiracy theory or the thought of analyzing and dissecting pieces of popular culture. She could easily see herself like this with him: passionate, wild-eyed, thoroughly engrossed (or obsessed. It depended on who you asked, of course)

When they’d departed for their separate dorms, she couldn’t help but feel dejected. Back in the safety of her room, she changed into pajamas to get the smell of grease and exhaust and brooding boy she had a desperate crush on, off of her. She pressed play on the saddest playlist she had curated and poured her heart onto the pages of her diary.

The last week of the program came far too quickly. The feeling in the lecture hall was different as well. The homesick were excited for the end to be near, but Betty wasn’t ready to be back in New York. She wasn’t sure this new, improved Betty would hold up under her mother’s increasing scrutiny. She didn’t know how much time she had before she broke completely.

“For your last assignment, I want you to do something that scares you. Obviously I don’t mean skydiving or anything, but something to do with your writing that scares you,” the professor said before dismissing them. “Write in a different tense or point of view; write a different style; share your work with a different audience. Just find the one thing you haven’t done yet here and just...let go.”

Betty snuck a look at Jughead from the corner of her eye. His brow was furrowed, jaw clenched tight, appearing deep in thought. She let out a shaky breath before going to smooth back the ponytail that wasn’t there.

_This is it,_ she thought. Her chance. To tell him how she felt, to bare her soul to him even more than she already had. She was up and out of her chair the second they were dismissed, talking herself into her decision with every step that led her back toward the dorms.

“Hey,” his voice was soft, pensive as he opened the door. They hadn’t spoken much that day, just a text confirming he was in his room.

Producing a hastily wrapped parcel from behind her back, Betty sighed. “If I don’t do this now, I won’t. The scariest thing for me, right now, is you reading what’s in there.”

“Betts,” he started, but she stopped him.

“There’s a lot of me in those pages that I could never share with anyone else. Whether they’d look at me differently or,” she shook her head stepping back, further into the hall. “Just read it...or don’t...either way, you’ll know where to find me.”

She didn’t stay to hear if he had anything to say, turning away from the boy holding the pieces of her heart, of herself, literally in his hands. Back in her room, she called her best friend Veronica and asked if she would watch some horribly cliched eighties teen comedy with her over facetime. She was asleep before “the guy” realized he was an idiot.

Morning came quickly, as it usually did, but it seemed even faster knowing her days were dwindling. The light filtered through the blinds, dust floating lazily in the haze. She threw her head back into the pillows, hoping to be swallowed by slumber once again. But something niggled at the back of her mind. Something was keeping her firmly rooted in the waking plane.

The sound of a knock on her door.

She wasn’t sure if she was ready to face what she thought awaited her. When another knock came, and then another, more persistent knock, she willed herself out of bed and across the floor. Hugging tight the robe she threw on, she opened the door.

Jughead didn’t look like he’d slept at all. His hair, normally secured under his beanie, was wildly sticking up in all directions. The eyebags that were everpresent on his face seemed deeper and more pronounced, and she was pretty sure he was still wearing the same thing he’d been wearing when she dropped the journal off to him.

The journal that was presently clutched between his hands.

“Did you mean it?”

Confused, she questioned back. “Mean what?”

“All of it? Any of it?” His voice seemed softer now, more unsure than she’d ever heard him. In their nearly six weeks of friendship he had seemed so confident. He was the one who approached her in the first place. But looking at him now, hands clenching at the notebook between them, maybe she wasn’t the only one who got more than just someone to look over their work.

Her eyes sought his, finding their usually blue hue stormy and grey. “Juggie, if I didn’t mean it, I wouldn’t have written it. And I certainly wouldn’t have shown you.”

He stepped closer, invading her space with his large body. “Betty,” he exhaled slowly. “There’s a reason nothing happened after we went to Pop’s and it wasn’t because I didn’t want it to.”

She watched his Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he swallowed. “Then why?”

“Because I’m an all or nothing kind of guy, Betty. And I know this has an expiration date! It’s five days from now. You’re leaving Saturday, to go back to New York. Where you’re going to do amazing things. Because you’re amazing, and nothing you do could be anything less.”

“That’s not true, or objective, you know that right? We both only have a year of high school left and then what? You could come to New York—”

He shook his head sadly. “Betty, I’m not coming to New York. I’ll probably never end up leaving Riverdale.”

“Then I’ll come here! I like it here, Jug. I could come here, and we can…” His hand reached for her, finding golden locks and twisting them between his fingers.

“I could never ask that of you.”

“Why are you here then?” She asked cooly as his hand fell from her hair.

Slowly he dragged the hand that had been playing with her hair through his own before huffing a laugh. “I honestly don’t know. My plan was kissing you as soon as you opened the door and then my brain got involved.”

She felt the corner of her lip turn up. “Brains are dumb. They always get in the way.”

He smiled back at her, both of them moving even closer together. “Betty, I’m not one of those guys who does casual. I need to know that you're in this. Really, in this. That you want to be WITH me as much as I want to be with you because I can handle the distance if I knew you were all in.”

Brushing one of many unruly curls from his brow, Betty smiled. “Jughead Jones, haven’t you figured it out by now?”

He raised an eyebrow to her question, his arm coming to snake around her waist.

“I don’t do anything in halves.”

When their lips finally met she knew instantly that her life would be different. Maybe she didn’t know right then just how different, but she could tell you, with certainty that that summer changed her life. She had followed her heart and finally got it right.

**Author's Note:**

> Songfic Challenge: Day Three- A song that reminds you of summer- In This Diary- The Ataris
> 
> *reposted and still un-beta'ed*
> 
> (Did y'all know how awesome theheavycrown was? Oh, of course, you did? Header by her. )


End file.
